Is a 200-300 mile range enough for Tesla to break into electric trucking?

Changes already coming to the trucking industry could make this a viable market for Tesla.

Enlarge/ From the bureau of Transportation Statistics: “Long-haul freight truck traffic in the United States is concentrated on major routes connecting population centers, ports, border crossings, and other major hubs of activity. Except for Route 99 in California and a few toll roads and border connections, most of the heaviest traveled routes are on the Interstate System.”

Further Reading

Ars reached out to the company to confirm the report, and a spokesperson responded with a statement saying: “Tesla’s policy is to always decline to comment on speculation, whether true or untrue, as doing so would be silly.”

So if the report is true, would a truck with a range of 200-300 miles be enough to win entry into the freight trucking market? Possibly. A 2013 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado notes that “trucks dominate the market today for freight shipments under 500 miles, which account for almost 80 percent of all domestic freight tonnage.” Freight that needs to travel 500 miles or more tends to be transported by rail, waterways, or pipeline, at least if you’re counting by tonnage (the Bureau of Transportation Statistics counts oil and gas pipeline deliveries as freight).

While long-haul trucking beyond 500 miles is obviously cost-effective for some deliveries (especially to areas that aren’t on a rail line or waterway), there seems to be a robust market for truck hauls under 500 miles that Tesla could break into.

Ken Harper, the Marketing Director for freight exchange service DAT, is bullish on Tesla’s ability to make a semi that is competitive with diesel for some situations. The key is that all truckers are currently not allowed to work more than a certain number of hours out of 24 anyway—including time when they’re waiting at a dock to unload or waiting for the truck to charge. With a 200-300 mile range, “You could take a load up from point A to point B, load up again, and you still have time left on your hours of service.”

“The big question is going to be the financial trade off,” Harper said. “Aside from drivers, the biggest cost is fuel and maintenance, and if you lower the cost of fuel and maintenance, [you can] compare it to a regular diesel.”

Last August, when Tesla announced that it was thinking about building a semi, Ars senior auto editor Jonathan Gitlin talked to some electric trucking experts about the viability of this plan. Ryan Popple, the CEO of zero-emissions bus manufacturer Proterra, said at the time that he suspected Tesla’s semi could be an internal project that would run Gigafactory batteries to the Tesla manufacturing facility. Interestingly, the Sparks, Nevada Gigafactory and the Fremont, California Tesla assembly plant are 239 miles apart from each other. (The battery-laden trucks would also have the advantage of losing several thousand feet in elevation on their trip out to the Fremont plant, while they would be able to drive up that elevation on the return trip empty.)

ELD regulations

Another factor could play a part in whether Tesla’s truck could compete with diesel counterparts: on December 18, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will begin requiring 3.5 million commercial truckers to install electronic logging devices on their trucks, replacing the pen-and-paper hour-logging system that some truckers currently use. Most large corporate fleets already use these ELDs, but smaller fleets and independent contracting truckers will have to invest in the devices. The result is that smaller fleets might see a higher cost for freight hauls longer than 450 miles. According to a blog post from DAT, the impact of the EDLs “will be felt disproportionately on longer, one-day hauls of over 450 miles and also on short-haul operations that push the current 14-hour limits today.”

“Any time ELD requirements cause trips to spill over into a second day, it means rescheduled appointments, missed reloads, and a host of operational issues,” DAT wrote. If traditional trucks are suffering from the same kinds of problems that electric trucks might face (that is, limits on range due to either regulation of drivers’ hours or battery chemistry), then the proposition of going electric becomes more reasonable.

Of course, what we don’t know is how big the semis will be and how big their corresponding batteries will be. Harper also says that a sticking point will be charging—semis can’t just charge in a grocery store parking lot using the passenger car charger that’s there today. New charging points will have to be installed in many places.

But there’s time to figure that out. Tesla is “a couple years out” from actually having these semis in a mass-market setting. “They need to manufacture these vehicles,” Harper said. “Then they’ll have testers, private fleets, early adopters.”